


The Sweetmeat (New York 1984)

by Sheffield



Series: Young Sandburg [4]
Category: Sentinel - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 13:28:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2852453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the last of the Young Sandburg series (although I always had it in mind to write a Miami Vice crossover but I couldn't make the timeline work).  I'm extremely grateful to Banbury, who gave me a copy of this story when I thought the internet had swallowed it up for ever.  Sigh.  I miss Geocities.  I could do Geocities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweetmeat (New York 1984)

The Sweetmeat

by Sheffield

New York 1984

 

"Robert McCall."

Mostly he let the machine take his calls, sort out the crazies, but sometimes something made him pick up the phone himself.

"Are you the Equalizer?"

There was desperation in that voice, real desperation. He felt the familiar sensation of the world coming into sharper focus. He'd retired from covert ops., yes, but he was still hooked on the rush of doing the things that most people couldn't or wouldn't, of doing the things that would quench that desperation.

"Yes I am. What can I do for you, young man?"

"Please. Please! You have to help me. I can't wake the others up, and they're going to be back soon."

"Calm down, all right? Now then. Who can't you wake up, and who will be back soon? But first of all, who are you?"

"My name's Blair Sandburg-"

"All right, Blair. And where are you?"

"I don't know. The number is 555 1279. I didn't get to see the house when they brought us here but it's big - got attics and cellars and stuff. I was locked in the attic with the rest of the boys but I hadn't really drunk the coke so I wasn't really unconscious. I can't get out, and anyway I can't leave the others."

"Why don't you call the police, Blair?"

"No! No pi- no police. Please!"

"Why not?"

"Because it was a policeman who sold me to them."

"Sold?"

Robert McCall's voice rose a notch, and he sat up in his chair, put down the newspaper and focused all his intelligence and experience and will on this youngster on his phone. He didn't like people traffickers, and he didn't like people who trafficked in children, not at all.

"They're coming back. You have to help us. Please. Please!"

And then there was just the dial tone, as the boy either hung up or was cut off.

Robert McCall, the Equaliser, was already dialling.

"Kostmeyer."

"Mickey? Get over here. Now."

 

In the end, it wasn't much of an operation. Seven minutes and two phone calls got him the address that went with the phone number. Kostmeyer meanwhile made a few other calls and turned up three more guys, a van and the necessary equipment. Which all turned out to be major overkill, because there were only two men standing guard over the seventeen drugged up children shivering in the attic room and one - dirty, bedraggled, dressed like the others in his underwear and a pair of plastic cuffs - was awake and alert and standing, shaking, between his unconscious companions and the men with guns.

"Blair?" McCall said with surprising - to anyone who knew his background - gentleness.

"Equaliser?" the boy said shakily.

"That's right," McCall said gently. "That's right." And McCall's strong arms were there to catch him as the boy slid unwilling into the drug-fuelled dark.

 

"Blair! Good morning. I trust you slept well?"

The boy's hair stood out wildly in all directions, and the striped robe belonging to Scott, McCall's son, was too long and too wide for the boy, so that all you could see of him were some skinny ankles, that bird's nest of hair, and the tips of his fingers as he rubbed sleep out of his eyes.

He stood uncertainly in the doorway.

"Tea? Or would you prefer coffee? Or indeed milk, hot or cold, or perhaps juice?"

"Er... tea is fine, thanks, Sir."

"Robert will do, I think. We're going to be friends, after all, even if we haven't been properly introduced yet. I'm Robert McCall, Blair. Also known as the Equaliser. Pleased to meet you properly at last. Come over and sit down. This villainous looking chap is Mickey Kostmeyer, one of the men who came with me to fetch you last night. Ignore the fact that he looks like a thug, will you? Mostly he's quite civilised."

"Mostly," Kostmeyer said, bright eyed. "Pleased to meet you, Blair. You did good yesterday."

The boy, bewildered, moved on automatic and both men let him settle himself, handed him tea, toast, juice, let him get oriented.

"Where are the others?" he asked at last. McCall smiled. "They're all quite safe. They're all on the same corridor at a nice, safe hospital, with uniformed policemen standing guard until they can all be identified and their parents come to collect them. It seems they took quite a hit from the drugs they were given; you were the only one who showed any signs of coming out of it."

"They're going to be all right, aren't they?"

"Yes: they're still unconscious but the doctors say they'll all make a full recovery after they've slept it off."

The boy lifted his cup of tea and then adrenalin flooded his system as his brain caught up with what McCall had said. The cup fell on the floor in pieces and Blair found himself standing against the wall with the inadequate protection of a butter-knife clutched in his hand, pointed at the two men.

"Why aren't I with them?" he said shakily. "Why did you bring me here?"

McCall, completely unfazed, produced another cup and poured Blair some more tea.

"That's a good question, Blair - I can call you Blair, can I? The simple answer is, we managed to identify parents or guardians for all of the other kidnapped children but you, Mr Sandburg, are something of a puzzle. So I pulled a few strings: I have a number of friends in the New York Police Department. And I arranged that, although technically speaking you're in the custody of the New York State Department of Families and Children, they have - shall we say - placed you in foster care with me, until this is all sorted out."

Kostmeyer had picked up the broken pieces of the teacup and calmly mopped up the tea. The boy, shaking, followed his movement with his butter knife until McCall calmly plucked it out of his hand and - gently, as if he were made of fine china - put him back into the chair.

"It's only natural that you should be a little jumpy after all you've been through, but, I repeat, you're quite safe here, Blair."

"How do I know that? I thought I was safe with the cops."

"That's true. You've had a shock, and met with some atypical behaviour, but you mustn't lose sight of the fact that it WAS atypical. Most policemen are quite trustworthy. Most people, for that matter, are quite trustworthy. You had the misfortune to meet up with the exception that proves the rule."

 

It was worse than either of them had thought. Kostmeyer and McCall looked in silent fury at the report they had commissioned on their young charge and his circumstances. His mother - his only parent - was off in Nepal seeking "enlightenment" and she had despatched her fifteen year old son half way around the world alone, relying on a relay of friends and acquaintances to pass him along one to another, as if the boy were nothing more than a parcel.

The chain had held across India and the Middle East, then north through Europe to London where he had been despatched on a transatlantic flight alone instead of, as planned, accompanied by a woman whose only connection with his mother seemed to be that they'd once spent three weeks in the same Arkansas commune. The London connection had been turned back at the airport as being too pregnant to travel, so the boy Blair had arrived in New York alone, with only a name and a phone number.

This was the point the chain had broken. The cop who picked him up at the airport had been under suspicion for months but IA had never had enough to put him away. Now, with Blair's testimony, that was one child trafficking operation that was firmly retired.

"What are you going to do about Blair?" Kostmeyer asked.

"I'm glad you asked me that question, Mickey. I might have a few ideas."

Kostmeyer had only meant, how were they going to handle the fact that he needed to be a protected witness till the case went to trial and the trafficking ring was fully broken. But Mickey had been around McCall long enough to recognise that tone; the "Mickey, just pop along to Chechnya and fetch this family from prison camp, there's a good chap," tone. He looked with renewed interest at the photographs of Ms Sandburg and her associates.

 

George Hargreave was a lucky man. About to graduate first in his class, he had the choice of law firms bidding for his services and, because of his prowess on the football field, he also had options if he wanted to make his fortune as a player first. His secret ambition, however, was to do something that would make use of both his brain and his brawn, and he hadn't shared that ambition with anyone.

Until Mickey Kostmeyer came along, that is.

"George."

"Mr Kostmeyer."

"Like I told you, George, just Mickey is cool. What have you got for me?"

"OK, then. The kid is fine, straight A student, moved from a dorm room into a single after someone dropped a dime on a little doping ring the other dorm guys were running. He's working weekends in a diner where half the professors eat so he's made friends with practically every subject area on campus. Oh, and the football team have adopted him as a mascot after the numbers showed they won every time he was at a game."

Mickey already knew about the dorm move, from the intercept they had on the university's correspondence with Naomi. And the football team won whenever George Hargreave pulled out the stops, so it wasn't hard to see how the football team got their idea that Blair was good luck. But you had to admire his ingenuity. He'd make a good field agent, and McCall's recommendation to Control wouldn't do him any harm in achieving his goals.

George looked curiously at his mentor. "You planning on seeing the kid while you're here?"

Kostmeyer smiled.

"No. Like I told you before, McCall and I just want to make sure he's safe, not to interfere."

If George Hargreave ever wondered why his first assignment was to arrange protection to some snot-nosed kid alone at college, he never broke security and voiced the thought. But, in later years, as he saw the top secret reports on the progress of the Sentinel and Guide project, he drew entirely the wrong conclusions.


End file.
